"Why, if you look out of an English window or a window flying over England do you know that you're in, or over, England?" That seems a reasonable question to ask, and at least it distinguishes Harry Mount's book from the others in the huge pile of books about Englishness, the pile that includes Jeremy Paxman's The English, Kate Fox's roughly anthropological let's-observe-them-at-a-football-match take on the subject in Watching the English and Peter Mandler's scholarly history of ideas in The English National Character. Focusing on the physical fabric of England, from rock formations to road signs to greenhouses, Mount presents himself as our amiable guide to the view from our window or a walk down the high street. He sets out to help us read our ordinary surroundings with greater insight. But more than that, and much more riskily, he wants to show how the English environment has created national characteristics and how those characteristics have shaped the environment.
Mount had a Christmas bestseller in 2006 with his pain-free guide to Latin, Amo, Amas, Amat and All That. Following that cheerful crash course in classics, How England Made the English might function as a remedial course in geography, with valuable lessons on rivers, town planning and road structure. I, for one, wish I'd concentrated more on it at school. The revelation of its capacity to enrich normal life came rather late, when we eventually learned that you can "read" the development of many towns in concentric circles spreading from the ancient centre to the Victorian and modern suburbs. I'm not sure why I needed someone to point this out, but I'm glad they did, and I'm repeatedly struck by the number of people who reach undergraduate level without ever having been encouraged to consider the shape of a city or the most basic architectural history. Mount is right: these things matter, and, as with Latin, a little goes a long way.
But why reduce it all to a relentless list of facts and figures, as Mount does here? Reading this book felt like being stuck in the "Curious things about England" round of the world's longest pub quiz. Observations about canals, trees, and tomato-growing habits appear as trivia, not because they are trivial but because Mount refuses to pause over any of them long enough to explain their significance. His favourite word is "also" because it allows him to link facts together without deciding exactly how they relate.
Some of the statistics are indeed amazing, and the facts are quirkily evocative. I'm glad to know that England's oldest surviving post-Roman brick is at Little Coggeshall Abbey in Essex and that Stanley Dock in Liverpool is the biggest brick building in the world. Old Sarum Castle wins the prize for earliest decorated chimney, the English being good at chimneys because they have long needed to keep warm. I am newly educated in moat-building: there are 5,000 in England but only 31 in Scotland; round ones are generally earlier than square ones; and the number of moats in an area depends on the soil. Mount's twist on the moat-cleaning expenses scandal is to point out that Lincolnshire, where Douglas Hogg lives, is not good moat-country at all.
It's not all castles. Mount pays attention to paving and kerbstones; he tells us who designed the white lettering on motorway signs. He is very good on private spaces and English ways of controlling them: box pews, hedges, varieties of wall, and regional variations on the five-bar gate. But Mount is on to the next fascinating fact before he or anyone else has had time to register the last one. "Sussex was once so impenetrably dense with trees that it was the last southern county to accept Christianity." That surely needs some explanation if it's going to be interesting, a bit of qualification, perhaps even a footnote. But no, we're off again: there are so many facts to pack in.
The rapid succession of unexamined and dubiously connected statements can be giddying. In a chapter on how climate has influenced behaviour, Mount says that, because of the uncertain weather, the English are not well-practised at being outside after dark. He sees a cue and runs: "Our fevered drinking habits are related to our relationship with the opposite sex: the English male is particularly bad at talking to the English female. That awkwardness has grown out of a long history of English gender segregation. And that has a great deal to do with early industrialisation, itself related to England's geology." So that's how, in five easy stages, English rock formations lead to public inebriation. No objections I hope? On we go.
Does all this get us any closer to understanding Englishness? Not really, though that's a lot to ask. Generalisations large enough to encompass a nation often turn out to be bland, as when Mount describes "an English tendency for repetition of square and rectangular architectural units". I was immediately trying to think of countries that favour triangular or circular units. Told that the English have a terrible fear of socialising, it's inevitable that crowds of irrepressibly sociable acquaintances leap to mind.
Mount is much more engaging, and more credible, on the idiosyncratic details of England's landscape and built environment. His last book was called (bizarrely enough) A Lust for Window Sills because he notices and loves the fact that there are many kinds of sill. His version of Englishness, similarly, is always connected with variety. He maps out the great geological range of this small island, the many soil types, the different ways of laying bricks.
In discussing the best ways of fostering such variety, Mount can be infuriatingly partial and contradictory. Urban planning is tyrannical, but lax planning regulations are worse; the enclosures were dreadful, except that they kept England looking beautiful; private ownership is excellent, except when the owners have bad taste. Still, if more people look around them in England this summer and notice what the kerbstones and window-frames are made of, then that can be no bad thing.
Alexandra Harris's Virginia Woolf is published by Thames & Hudson.
